The Burly Unknown!

Hellooooo.  Read this and enjoy it.  If you don’t enjoy it, I kindly request that you go back in time and unread it.

Once again, here it is from the beginning.

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I jumped into the shuttle for Antigua and an hour later was dumped in the middle of the main square. This is where I think I finally stopped sweating. Metaphorically. Physically, I was still pouring sweat. It was around 1000 degrees there…Celsius.

I consulted the guidebook and chose the hostel with the most ridiculous name: Jungle Party. I picked my way through charming Antigua and arrived at the hostel. I had to shout through locked bars that looked stout enough to repel charging rhinos to gain entrance. I later learned that this hostel had been the victim of a recent heist. Apparently masked gunmen swept in and held around 40 guests and workers at gunpoint while they robbed them blind. A month after I left, the hostel was robbed again, presumably by the same gang, in spite of the gate and armed security guard. The rhinos never showed.

At this point in my travels, however, I was blissfully unaware of any trouble. This turned out to be a providential theme in my journey. I was always just ahead or just behind some sort of crime. At the end of my trip, I had traveled with a knifing victim, two bus jacking victims, and one pistol whipping victim, not to mention countless theft-ees. My solitary great tragedy was a stolen iPod that I left on a restaurant table overnight. It was blind luck that things turned out as well as they did for me. It certainly had nothing to do with any sort of special wherewithal on my part.*

As I bumbled along in Antigua, grinning like an idiot, drinking the water (replete with delicious and exotic component micro-organisms), and sampling the finest food each market stall had to offer (oh streetmeat… shall we ever cross paths again?), I fell in with some travelers.

Travelers are naturally herd creatures and crave the approval of others. I was no exception. And at this point I was starting to fancy myself a true traveler. After all, I had shrewdly maneuvered my way to this beautiful colonial town in Guatemala that I had never heard of. Who cares that five hours earlier I was in the Atlanta airport munching on a Cinnabon?  I was practicing my facial expressions of deep contemplation and cultural understanding. I probably just looked constipated.

The question was: where to next? I had no clue. I had gotten myself somewhere, now I needed to get myself somewhere else… somehow.

* My strategy if confronted by any sort of criminal was to squeal like a woman and then proceed to scream “Not in the face!  Not in the face!”